Hours of the Night, a collaboration between M.D. Coverley and Stephanie Strickland, is the most recent of their joint explorations. It arose from a concern for the portability of software in the current platform-rich e-lit environment, particularly because many of the tools they used in the past (Director, Flash) are no longer supported or have limited reach. Wishing to make use of a widely available and easily managed tool, they chose PowerPoint, believing it to be a popular, standard, authoring system, the products of which could be read on any desktop computer, tablet, or smart phone. Making and porting PowerPoint work turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. Fortunately the latest version of PowerPoint allows one to export MP4s from the PowerPoint file. Thus available in this exhibit is the truly portable MP4 and as well the PowerPoint file itself (as a slideshow). The latter is viewable only on a Windows machine equipped with PowerPoint for Windows and with the requisite fonts downloaded on it. The aesthetics of the piece are of course not those of a bit of a film but of a series of slides. Hours of the Night, an experimental poem, addresses subjects often avoided—age and aging, sleep and the night. (Source: ELO 2016, Artist's statement)

Technical notes:

The latter is viewable only on a Windows machine equipped with PowerPoint for Windows and with the requisite fonts downloaded on it.